L’Après-midi D’une Faune
L’Aprés-midi D’une Faune is a solo for dancer Mandi Tiukkanen by choreographer Dinis Machado with original music by Godill.
In this dance, they investigate and ask themselves about a butch femininity that would be in Machado's body, read only as a male manifestation. They get lost in this choreographic and intimate labyrinth where looking for the feminine is also realizing the intangibility of defining it. This dance takes place where Mandi lends her body to materialize Machado's trans-feminine subjectivity, and Machado in turn builds a space for Mandi's body, a feminine rarely imagined and materialized in the history and stages of classical dance. .
Thus, L'Aprés-midi D'une Faune is about a femininity that exceeds individual bodies, about a collective and social gender experience that happens between bodies and in the places where they cross and meet, in the way they question and potentiate each other. mutually. About how we can become the place where others can happen closer to how they imagine themselves.
Godill's music neither guides nor follows this Fauna, but rather accompanies her while she daydreams, like a sister or a spell for the walk of this dance of a winged hiker.
L’Aprés-midi D’une Faune is also about the intimacy of this feminine plurality of the three bodies that created it. It is about taking the space of this bucolic afternoon for its subjectivity, for its drift, self-sexuality and autonomy. It is the occupation of “a room just for you”.
L’Aprés-midi D’une Faune is about a trans experience as concrete as it is spiritual.
Artistic direction and choreography
Dinis Machado
Dance by
Mandi Tiukkanen
Original Soundtrack
Godill
Coproduced by
Weld (Stockholm),
MARC (Knislinge),
ZDB (Lisbon)
Palcos Instáveis (Porto)
Lisbon // ZDB // 12 and 13 Nov 2021
Knislinge // MARC // 12 Dec 2021
Stockholm // Weld // 16 to 19 Dec 2021
Porto // Palcos Instáveis // 19 Mar 2022
Press
L'Après-Midi D'une Faune (The Afternoon Of a She-Faun) by Thomas Olsson @ SvD
https://www.svd.se/en-queer-faun-som-gackar-alla-etiketter/av/thomas-olsson-54TR
A queer faun that eludes all labels
The faun embodied by the dancer Mandi Tiukkanen in Dinis Machado's version of "A faun's afternoon" is a searching figure. A faun who both seems to be sure of its identity and does not want to lock it in any position. In Dinis Machado's performances, the dancing body is not only in motion but also always in constant transformation. A body affected both by the room and by the situation it is in here and now, whether it is about political circumstances or, as in here, about more lust driven exercises.
At the same time, there is virtually nothing of a peacefully tripping faun on a journey of discovery in a forest glade to find here. On the contrary, it is a naughty and sometimes wicked smiling faun which, with strong straps, is fastened to a large and pinkish strap-on dildo on top of its blue wrestling suit. As part of a stage costume that literally highlights the physically strenuous, the athletic, it works surprisingly well. The unmistakable presence of something resembling a genital organ is there but does not, so to speak, hang in the way of the whole.
As in previous works, there are texts here that mix theoretical queer thoughts with concrete and everyday experiences, where a walk to the supermarket can be described as a walk through Hell while the home is one of the few safe and permissive places. This very safe and permissive room also characterizes Machado and Tiukkanen's "L'Après-Midi D'une Faune". Perhaps more like an experimental wearhouse, given sound by Godill, and which scenography mainly consists of an orange curtain that can be raised and sunk in the place of a glade in an imaginary forest. On a lilac background, the read text is projected.
In Mandi Tiukkanen, Dinis Machado has found a partner who, with her way of expressing herself and her physical figure, adds something to the choreographic material found in previous works. They have also danced together in the children's show "Inhaka" by the Brazilian choreographer and collaborator Elisabete Finger.
In "Normcore", which was shown at Weld in January 2020, among other things, Mandi Tiukkanen was one of five dancers in an equally playful and lust-driven piece. It was also one of their first works which Dinis Machado did not perform themself. "L'Après-Midi D'une Faune" explores another aspect of changeable bodies that refuse to be labelled.
Project funded by
